Letter Beads: Crafts & Projects & FUN!

Froot Loop and I did a fun activity. We tried spelling, lacing, and sorting with manuscript letter beads. Then, we made a sensory bottle with some recycleables and art supplies! 

I used these beads here.

We also used pipe cleaners.

We sorted by color into a muffin tin.

Of course, I got so into it with him that I forgot to take a picture of this. But, we had one tin for red, and one for orange, yellow, etc. Then, I asked him to sort the letters, so he put As in one tin, and Os, and Qs, and Es, etc. That was a little harder for him.

Froot Loop grabbed all the letter Os and threaded them onto his pipe cleaner. Then he grabbed all the Qs. We made a bracelet for him out of it. 

The lacing is a great fine motor skill and takes a lot of concentration. 

We also practiced patterns (also didn’t photograph as it took all my attention) with the letters and colors. We did ABABAB, AABAABAAB, ABBABBABB, AABBAABB, and ABCABC as well as some others like AABCAABC, etc. Froot Loop is getting the hang of patterns and often points out to me when he sees a pattern in the “wild”! He can get most patterns with up to three different types of objects. Once we introduce a fourth, he gets confused. We’re working on it! 

Then we worked on spelling. We did a lot of sight words that he has been working on as well as our names. Then he helped me make the banner picture for this site. It was actually a derivative of his idea. 

Finally, we found an old juice bottle in the recycling and I decided to make a discovery alphabet jar. I picked out two full sets of letters and also put in some glitter. This glitter is fantastic for these jars and looks great. 

I realized that the water is not quite viscous enough to allow the letters to float through the bottle. I dumped out some water and added a bottle of corn syrup.
The corn syrup helped, but I ended up having to dump a lot of water out and adding quite a bit of corn syrup. I think we used too big of a bottle. Oh well, live and learn (plus that was the only plastic bottle I had at the time). Using corn syrup makes the letters swirl around more and it is easier to treat this discovery jar as an Eye Spy activity. 

We had a blast playing with these letters. They have a lower case set that I have my eye on as well. There were 288 pieces in the box and it included every letter of the alphabet. The letters were in a variety of colors too, including red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple, white, and black. The beads are incredibly easy to thread onto pipe cleaners and yarn and are a GREAT way to build fine motor and prewriting skills in those little hands. I highly recommend these letters for anyone with a preschooler. They're great for arts and crafts, spelling, sensory bins, and more. 

Of course, they are small enough to choke on, so keep them away from babies and toddlers, dogs, and anything else that tries to put everything in their mouths (I’m looking at YOU, Lucky Charms!). 

I even had fun with them. I made some pipe cleaner bracelets with random words on them (one or two may or may not have been Star Trek themed, and another one may or may not have been “dirty”). I also liked how they felt in my hands, and I spent a little too much time staring at the letter sensory bottle. I was very tired and watching the glitter and letters float around was hyptonizing. 

What would you do with your letter beads?